A Drop in the Ocean
by SydneyLouWho
Summary: She wore feathers in her hair and chains around her heart. Sally/Poseidon. T for sexual references. For Fanfiction ImagiNation's Winter Exchange


**For Selene (Reality Hits Hard) in Fanfiction ImagiNation's Winter Exchange, I'm really sorry that it's so late. Also, I apologize in advance for the loose interpretation of the prompts and possible canon errors (I researched a lot, but I haven't read the books in ages).**

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_**prompts: **__ingenue | __dalliance | __atoms being compressed into a speck of__infinitely small proportions_

* * *

She was so young, barely older than a child. She wore feathers in her hair and chains around her heart. She was young, but she'd stopped believing in happy endings long ago. The real world was too painful for happy endings.

_But he looked like a prince. He acted like a prince. He whispered warm words into her ears. He held her and she wanted to compress every atom of her body so that she could fit into his palm and be held forever. He pressed his lips to her neck and his hands to her hips and everything seemed like it would work out perfectly_.

(It never works out perfectly.)

* * *

When Sally had met him, she figured he'd be just like the rest. She knew the moment they'd met that they would have sex. A few years alone and she knew exactly what handsome men wanted from her, and she'd comply because how else could she fill the empty void where her heart used to be.

(But, truth be told, she knew that the other men couldn't fill the void that Death had left there; it was just another way to forget, just for a moment.)

* * *

_As a child, Sally loved the beach. She'd always been jealous of the water's freedom and it's power, two things_ _that she'd never had._

* * *

She didn't have a plan for her life (her plans had all been flushed down the drain since she'd quit school), so she hadn't planned on falling in love.

But she could have guessed that, if she ever did fall for someone, he would leave her; nobody stayed in her life for long.

The sea god left her in a puddle of tears, clutching her abdomen. He forced himself not to care, after all, he'd gotten women pregnant before; she'd get over it.

* * *

They all stared; she was so young and so alone and the bump of her abdomen was growing. She could hear them whisper at the market and on the streets about the broken girl, her eyes hollow and sad.

She didn't want to care about what they thought, but she didn't have a friend in the world and the strangers' opinions were all too loud.

* * *

When he visited her again, he cupped her face and wiped her tears. Sally felt safe again, but his love was fleeting.

He kept a feather in his pocket to remind himself of why he couldn't stay.

Poseidon warned her, the child she carried was dangerous. He told her that he was part of a prophecy, that he needed to be hidden away, but she wouldn't listen.

(Cursed 21st century women, he thought, they think they're superior to everyone.)

His fist collided with the mirror on her wall, shattering it. The anger of a god was more powerful than any human emotion, but she refused to let him take her child away.

"I'll protect him, I promise. I won't let him destroy the world."

Humans have a tendency to make promises that they have no idea how to keep.

When he left, he left into a storm and she tried to follow him, to plead for him to stay, but he was faster than her and she eventually had to stop. The tears that stained her cheeks weren't even visible when combined with the rain.

* * *

When she gave birth to her son, he wasn't there. It took everything in him not to go to her, but he decided to wait, to let her clutch the rails of her hospital bed rather than his hand.

It was something he'd regret until Percy Jackson had been dead for a hundred years.

* * *

_How cruel and unfair it was that Percy, too, had to grow up without a functioning family. _

* * *

In her dreams, there was an ocean; the tides were calm and the water was clear. She dipped her toe in and the water caressed her skin. Fully submerged, she didn't feel the need to breathe, nor to hold her breath; she was serene, as if she was a part of the ocean. He appeared, emerging from deep underwater, looking like he had when they'd first met and her heart felt fuller.

She woke up to an empty bed and the same hollow heart, looking into the broken mirror as if it had the answers.

Sally vowed that she'd never let Percy see how empty she was.

* * *

It was inevitable that Percy would eventually leave her and she'd known about Camp Half-Blood before he had, but that didn't make it any less difficult to let him go, to come home to an empty house, not knowing if her son was dead somewhere and hoping that her husband would never come home.

(He always did.)

* * *

When her son died, she wasn't there; he died at the hands of a monster whose name she couldn't pronounce, just shy of his twentieth birthday. His girlfriend delivered the news via iris message, a mess of tears on her cheeks and blood on her hands. They cried together for what seemed like an eternity.

Years later, she visited Montauk with Paul for the first time since Percy's death. The ocean no longer gave her that warm feeling anymore; the waves felt icy around her ankles. But as she stood there, the water seemed to grow warmer, as if saying, "I'm sorry." She often forgot that he loved Percy too.

It wasn't freedom from the pain and it surely wasn't a happy ending, but, for once, Sally was okay.


End file.
